Author: ChrisC

RSS Feed

It’s just dawned on me that, after my discussion about NetNewsWire last week, I have yet to enable a feed for this site.

Well now I have – at the bottom of every blog page there should now be a link to this site’s RSS feed.

NetNewsWire

Huzzah! NetNewsWire – the first RSS reader that I ever really used in anger – is back as a modernised and updated open source project! A lack of external sync services marks it out as still quite far from a usable initial release, but, as soon as some of these are added I shall look at moving away from the moribund Reeder and back to NNW as my desktop RSS reader of choice.

Now all we need is for Google to retask the now defunct Google+ team to resurrecting Google Reader and we can all start RSS’ing like it’s 2007 again! After all, without Google+ (or a similar replacement), there is no need for Google to try and kill off the open web in favour of their own walled garden.

(And for anyone searching; the new NetNewsWire agent string is “NetNewsWire (RSS Reader; https://ranchero.com/netnewswire/)”)

Clarus the Dogcow

A 512 Pixels article (and video) on Clarus the Dogcow; Apple’s unofficial mascot from back when computers were still fun and not just second cousin to your fridge.

512 pixels also does us the favour of covering the history of the Dogcow in actual human readable text – each character lovingly rendered in quickly skimable prose. After all, sometimes you’d rather just deal with the topic on hand than listening to someone else speak.

Linkspam

A short but sweet link on why someone has gone back to running a personal website – rather than rely on the mess that is social media and external hosting.

The web was better in 2004 than today; it was more personal and more compact yet, somehow, oddly bigger too. Today I see the same layouts, the same themes the same themes, the same algorithmically curated content on so many pages.

And it’s not like the algorithmically curated content is any good; if I’ve just bought a toaster or a USB cable or a hoodie then it’s unlikely that I’m going to want another one tomorrow. Yet, again and again, the same thing appears in my feed and follows me around the internet.

Of course the internet has far more users today than it did back then (from hundreds of millions to 3-4 billion today), but most people end up in a corner that reflect’s them and theirs and there is no reason that these small corners cannot multiply and thrive away from the big content providers.

MSDOS 6.22

I’ve added a new section and created the first content to go in it – a short tutorial on running MSDOS 6.22 in QEMU on a Raspberry Pi. Alas, it’s a little rough and ready, but quality should improve as I get more practice.

I think that the next one I do will be a Windows 3.11 tutorial as I can build on the DOS 6.22 work I’ve just done.

Slow-mo Flicker

So June should bring us this year’s WWDC with all the usual chintz and glitz that we’ve come to expect. This summer, however, one thing I would like to see in IOS 13 would be a form of flicker reduction for slow motion videos. The video below – a short piece of some rain on a wet platform – is a prime example of this; a dull video of raindrops on standing water is reduced, thanks to overhead artificial lighting, to a headache-inducing mess of flickering images.

Will no one rid me of these troublesome flickers?

Brucie Bonus

In the long distant past – before he spend his time pissing Kevin Smith off – Bruce Willis apparently released a single; a cover of ‘Respect Yourself’ by the Staple Singers. It even reached the dizzying heights of no. #7 in the uk singles chart.

And it’s absolutely awful!